Сообщество тестировщиков ПО в Днепре

SeleniumConf Berlin 2017 by Pavel Strunkin

First of all, I want to say thank you and that I’m eternally grateful to Fashionette GmbH for giving me an opportunity to attend the conference. There were incredibly a lot of people in the conference who lead the industry of automation testing. It’s an unbelievable feeling when you can talk to the people who really contributed to this field, as for example the creators of such tool as Selenium 🙂

Here I would like to highlight some performances and give a short review on them.

Everything said is personal opinion and does not pretend to be completely true 🙂

In order to feel at least a part of this energy I advise you to check the first talk of the conference: Simon Stewart: State of the Union: To Infinity and Beyond

It’s a really good choice for the opening talk. Simon Stewart is a famous person and a fantastic speaker with passionate speech. Indeed, the talk was about past, current and future of Selenium. Once more Simon introduced core committers and proposed each and every person to join them. It was really unbelievable to know that, for example, Java implementation is actively supported only by two people (and only one for .Net). An important point was that any person can contribute even without technical skills by creating documentation and triaging bugs from backlog.

As you know, conferences are always full of advertisement and almost all of the partners provide a cloud based solution for running tests. But if you were looking for some open source solutions you could only find Selenium server (Selenium grid) and some other solutions based on it. Now we have a promising replacement – Selenoid, written on Go which makes it much faster, reliable and lightweight comparing to java solution. I got to know about Selenoid from another talk that is also worth to be mentioned:Ivan Krutov: Scalable Selenium Cluster: Up & Running http://aerokube.com/ The speaker suggests step by step tutorial for setting up your new infrastructure with Docker. It is one of the strongest and most interesting speeches.

Unfortunately, other talks were targeted at people with basic knowledge or not related to automation testing (psychology/sociology/management). Some of the speeches were made by really skillful speakers and worth to be seen:

Richard Bradshaw: Your Tests Aren’t Flaky, You Are!

Patty Evans: Care and Feeding of Open Source Developers: A Framework for Successful Communication

Although, in my point of view, it’s not a really good distribution in favor of non-technical speeches.

Another point is that sometimes topics did not correspond to their names and even descriptions were not clearly related. So, you expect something like AI and as a result you get another example of overriding JUnit annotation to link test with issue number… Well, that not quite what you are waiting for. Moreover, some of the problems raised in the talks could have been easily resolved with already existing solutions that were not covered in talks. Surely, It’s not the fault of the speakers, they did their best and I really appreciate their work. Event organisers should check such cases in the reviews of the presentations beforehand as it’s not what the audience expect from the international conference of such size… Previous conference in London contained way stronger talks in my opinion. You could check them as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtqHXVoR7QSJARfhZ4dts1g

Despite the lack of technical speeches, of course, the most valuable information was taken from personal talks. SeleniumConf was the right place for that